How scientists tagged a blue whale from the air - Conservation International

Marina: Welcome to Deep Voices — I'm so glad you're here. I'm Marina, a marine biologist and science communicator, and this is the show where we dive into the world of whales and dolphins — their songs, their cultures, their family bonds, and the extraordinary science working to understand what they're actually saying. Marina: A huge thank you to today's sponsors: Ada, who help organizations integrate A I into their workflows in ways that actually make sense; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development experts covering everything from A I to full system-on-chip design; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio spanning the silicon industry. We couldn't do this without them. Marina: Today's episode is packed. We're going to talk about sperm whales — and what they do with their voices when the ocean gets noisy with ships. We're going to explore the astonishing A I-powered effort to decode animal language, including what it might mean to one day truly understand a whale. And we have a story about people fighting hard to protect one of the rarest large animals on Earth — the North Atlantic right whale. Let's go. Marina: So let's start with voices. Because that is, at the heart of it, what this show is about. And today's voice story involves the sperm whale — which, if you've never really thought about it, is one of the most acoustically extraordinary animals that has ever lived on this planet. Marina: Sperm whales don't sing the way humpbacks do — those long, haunting, evolving melodies. Instead, they communicate in clicks. Rapid, rhythmic patterns called codas. And these codas — they're not random. They're structured. They're social. Different clans of sperm whales around the world have different coda repertoires, almost like dialects, and calves learn them from the adults around them. That's culture. That's transmission of learned behavior across generations. Marina: Now here's where it gets really striking — and this comes from research reported recently in Popular Science. Scientists have found that sperm whales actually change how they communicate when ships are nearby. Think about what that means for a second. These animals are actively modifying their vocal behavior in response to human noise in their environment. Marina: The ocean has gotten dramatically louder over the past century. Shipping traffic, sonar, industrial activity — it all adds up to a kind of acoustic smog that permeates the deep sea. And for animals whose entire social lives, whose foraging, whose family bonds, depend on sound — that's not a small thing. That's an existential challenge. Marina: Researchers studying sperm whales have documented that in the presence of ship noise, whales may alter the timing, the repetition, even the structure of their codas. It's a bit like trying to have a conversation at a loud party — you lean in, you speak up, you repeat yourself, you simplify. These whales are doing something analogous. They are adapting, in real time, to a world we've made noisier. Marina: And what I find so moving about this research is what it implies. These whales aren't just reacting mechanically to noise. They're socially adjusting. The communication is flexible. It's responsive. It tells us that sperm whale communication is not a fixed, hardwired system — it has nuance, it has plasticity. And if their communication is that sophisticated, what exactly are they saying to each other? That question brings us to our second thread. Marina: Let's talk about decoding. Because right now, in 2024 and 2025, we are living through what I genuinely believe will be remembered as a turning point in our relationship with the natural world. Scientists are using A I — machine learning, large language models, the same kinds of tools that power the technology you might use every day — and they're turning them toward the voices of animals. Including whales and dolphins. Marina: A recent piece in Discover Magazine laid this out beautifully. The premise is deceptively simple: if you feed enough data into the right A I system, it can find patterns that human ears and human brains simply cannot detect. And whale and dolphin vocalizations are extraordinarily rich in pattern. Clicks, whistles, burst-pulse sounds, codas — there is structure in there. The question is whether we can learn to read it. Marina: One of the most ambitious efforts to do exactly that is Project CETI — that's the Cetacean Translation Initiative. A team of marine biologists, linguists, cryptographers, and A I researchers have set out to record thousands of hours of sperm whale communication — specifically the coda clicks — and to use machine learning to analyze them at a scale that's never been attempted before. Their goal isn't just to catalog sounds. It's to understand context. Who is speaking, who is listening, what's happening in the social moment when a particular coda is used. Marina: This is genuinely new territory. Because meaning in language — in any communication system — isn't just about the sounds themselves. It's about context, relationship, situation. A sperm whale coda that means one thing between a mother and calf might mean something entirely different between two adult males. Teasing that apart requires enormous amounts of data and very sophisticated analytical tools. Marina: And it's not just sperm whales. Researchers are building similar frameworks for bottlenose dolphins, for humpback whales, for orcas. Each species presents its own challenges. Orca communication, for instance, is extraordinarily complex — pods have distinct calls, and those calls change over time, and different pods have overlapping but distinct repertoires. It is, in every meaningful sense of the word, a dialect. Maybe something more. Marina: What A I brings to this is the ability to process, to find pattern, at a scale no human researcher could manage alone. It doesn't replace the marine biologist in the field, sitting on a boat, watching a whale surface, noting the context, understanding the biology. But it amplifies what that biologist can do with the data they collect. And that partnership — human intuition and A I pattern recognition working together — that feels like the future of this science. Marina: We're not there yet. I want to be honest about that. No one has cracked the code on whale language. We don't have a translation app. But the tools are getting sharper, the datasets are growing, and the questions being asked are getting more precise. And if we do one day understand, even partially, what a sperm whale is saying to its family in the deep — what a mother humpback sings to her calf — that will change everything about how we think about other minds on this planet. Marina: Now let's talk about people. Because this show is also about the relationship between humans and cetaceans — and right now, there is no more urgent chapter in that story than the one being written around the North Atlantic right whale. Marina: Massachusetts recently celebrated its fourth annual Right Whale Day, hosted at the New England Aquarium, and I want to take a moment to honor what that day represents — because it's not just a celebration, it's a reckoning. Marina: There are fewer than 370 North Atlantic right whales left on Earth. Let that number sit with you. Fewer than 370. And of those, fewer than 70 are reproductively active females. This is a species on the very edge. They were hunted nearly to extinction by commercial whalers — they were called "right" whales because they were the right whales to hunt: slow-moving, coastal, and they float when killed. That grim efficiency nearly wiped them out. Marina: Today, they don't face harpoons. They face ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear. Two of the leading killers of right whales today are entirely human-made problems. A right whale entangled in rope can carry that gear for months, even years — it drags on them, it exhausts them, it can prevent them from feeding, from mating, from nursing their calves. It is a slow, terrible thing to witness. Marina: And yet — and this is where the people part of this story becomes so vital — there are extraordinary humans working around the clock to stop it. The team at the New England Aquarium's Anderson Cabot Center has been tracking individual right whales for decades. They know these animals. They have names for them. They know their mothers, their calves, their histories. When a whale goes missing, these scientists feel it. Marina: Right Whale Day in Massachusetts is a chance to bring that urgency to the public. Because saving this species requires political will, regulatory change, and public attention. It requires shipping lanes to be shifted — and they have been shifted in some areas. It requires fishing gear modifications — ropeless traps, weak links, acoustic release systems — technologies that exist right now and could save whale lives if deployed at scale. Marina: And then there's the tagging work. Conservation International recently documented something that felt almost cinematic — scientists tagging a blue whale from the air. Using a drone to deliver a small, non-invasive satellite tag to one of the largest animals ever to have lived, from above, without a boat coming close enough to disturb the whale. The precision of it, the care of it, the sheer logistical audacity of it — I love that story. Marina: Because tags like those tell us where blue whales go. Where they feed. Where they travel. And that information is what allows scientists to say to regulators: here, this is a critical habitat corridor, ships need to slow down here, fishing gear needs to be configured differently here. The science feeds the conservation. The conservation feeds the policy. And somewhere in there, a whale gets to live. Marina: The right whale story and the blue whale tagging story are, at their heart, the same story. Humans paying attention. Humans choosing to use their intelligence and their technology not just to exploit the ocean, but to understand it, and to protect it. That's the version of ourselves I want us to be. Marina: And that brings us to one more moment I want to mark — World Dolphin Day. Mongabay News covered this recently, and what struck me was the emphasis on community reporting — encouraging people around the world to document unusual dolphin behavior, strandings, signs of distress, so that scientists can track what's changing in dolphin populations globally. Dolphins are often called sentinels of ocean health. What happens to them tells us something about what's happening to the ocean itself. Marina: So if you ever see a dolphin behaving strangely, or a whale in trouble, or a stranding on a beach — there are organizations and hotlines and reporting systems in place. You can be part of the data. You can be part of the science. That connection between ordinary people and the ocean — that's what gives me hope. Marina: We are living in this remarkable, strange moment where the technology to understand the voices of the deep is finally catching up with the depth of those voices. Where A I might one day help us understand what a sperm whale coda really means. Where a drone can tag a blue whale with such gentleness it barely notices. Where a room full of people in Massachusetts stand up and say the right whale matters, this species matters, we are not going to let them go. Marina: The sea is full of minds. Full of voices. Full of cultures and songs and family bonds that have been developing for millions of years longer than we have been here. I think the least we can do is listen. Really listen. Marina: Deep Voices, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. Thank you to each of them for making this show possible, and for believing that this kind of science storytelling matters. Marina: If today's episode moved you or made you think, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave a review, and share it with someone who loves the ocean — or who needs to. All the links to today's stories and the research we discussed are in the show notes. Go explore. Stay curious. And I'll see you in the deep.